Do you ever have one of those moments where you consider some behavior or predilection of yours—one so deeply innate to your personality that you never thought to question it before—in an entirely new light, and in a sudden flash of insight you understand how it originated and why it persists?
It doesn't happen to me often, but it did happen to me a week or two ago—not uncoincidentally, just as I was coming to the realization that there are at least three distinct (if not yet fully separate) personalities living there in the moist sponge behind my eyes. (But that's another memo for another day.)
Actually, I figured out the reason for two different predilections—quirks which had always seemed unrelated (or would have seemed unrelated had I bothered to give them any thought) but which are in reality very closely linked.
You see, my father liked to go bowling, and when I was small he took me along with him with some regularity. He didn't bowl in a league or with friends, at least not that I knew of—usually on these outings it was just he and I. And the amazing thing was, even when I was three, he didn't just drag me along to watch. He tried to teach me how to bowl so I could play too.
Now, after our outings at the lanes, we would often stop at McDonald's for a burger and fries on the way home. (And how those signs puzzled me when I was small! How could they possibly have served 12 billion when there were only 4 billion on the planet?) My father would get a Big Mac (two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun—and I could say it all backward, just like the people in the commercials), while I would have to be content with one of those flat little cardboardish regular hamburgers with one slice of pickle and a grudging squirt of ketchup.
But then one day when I was still just three or four, a miracle happened. My father and I were bowling at our favorite lanes in Eagle Rock. I stepped up to the line with an eight-pound ball cradled awkwardly in my arms, bent forward, rolled it with all my might, watched it chug down the lane with inexorable momentum . . . and then stood stunned at ball crept almost apologetically into the pocket and the pins toppled one by one. It was a strike! It was the very first strike of my life!
That was great enough, but the day was destined to get better. My father was so proud of me that when we arrived at McDonald's after our game he ordered me not an ordinary hamburger, but that Holy Grail of the fast-food universe—a Big Mac.
And I finished it all. Every bite.
When we got home, I burbled happily to my mother about all of it, and darn if she wasn't impressed with what a big boy I was now. I must have kept talking about it for days and days. Hell, I still tell people that I bowled my first strike when I was three.
So it shouldn't really come as any surprise that as an adult I can't keep away from bowling alleys and Big Macs. But of course, every time I go near them, I'm really seeking to recapture the feeling I had that day when I felt like a man in my father's eyes for the first (and maybe only?) time, and knew that he was proud of me.
Now if only something equally potent could get me hooked on racquetball and health food.
